Publication: Local Conflict in Indonesia: Measuring Incidence and Identifying patterns
Date
2004-08
ISSN
Published
2004-08
Author(s)
Abstract
The widespread presence of local
conflict characterizes many developing countries such as
Indonesia. Outbreaks of violent conflict not only have
direct costs for lives, livelihoods, and material property,
but may also have the potential to escalate further. Recent
studies on large-scale "headline" conflicts have
tended to exclude the systematic consideration of local
conflict, in large part due to the absence of representative
data at low levels of geographic specification. This paper
is a first attempt to correct for that. We evaluate a unique
dataset compiled by the Indonesian government, the periodic
Village Potential Statistics (PODES), which seeks to map
conflict across all of Indonesia's 69,000
villages/neighborhoods. The data confirm that conflict is
prevalent beyond well publicized "conflict
regions," and that it can be observed across the
archipelago. The data report largely violent conflict in 7.1
percent of Indonesia's lowest administrative tier
(rural desa and urban kelurahan). Integrating examples from
qualitative fieldwork, we assess issues in the measurement
of local conflict for quantitative analysis, and adopt an
empirical framework to examine potential associations with
poverty, inequality, shocks, ethnic and religious
diversity/inequality, and community-level associational and
security arrangements. The quantitative analysis shows
positive correlations between local conflict and
unemployment, inequality, natural disasters, changes in
sources of incomes, and clustering of ethnic groups within
villages. The institutional variables indicate that the
presence of places of worship is associated with less
conflict, while the presence of religious groups and
traditional culture (adat) institutions are associated with
conflict. We conclude by suggesting future areas of
research, notably on the role of group inequality and
inference, and suggest ways to improve the measurement of
conflict in the village census.
Citation
“Barron, Patrick; Kaiser, Kai; Pradhan, Menno. 2004. Local Conflict in Indonesia: Measuring Incidence and Identifying patterns. Policy, Research working paper;no. WPS 3384; Policy Research Working Paper;No.3384. © World Bank, Washington, D.C.. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/14148 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
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